Pale Gray for Guilt (2 page)

So we went up to the motel and sat in the kitchen alcove under the rackety-clatter of an overworked little window air conditioner, drank beer while he said Janine was fine, the boys were fine, and we talked about who we'd heard from and who we hadn't, and who was doing what. I stood by the window with the cold can in my hand and said, "What's all the big industry over there, up river?"

"TTA," he said with a tangible bitterness. "Tech Tex Applications. A nice clean industry, except every now and then any fool fish that comes up the Shawana turns belly-up and floats back down. And sometimes there's a funny little smell, sort of like ammonia, and the tears run down your face. But they employ four hundred people, Trav. Big tax base. They gave 'em the keys to the county to move in here."

"But I thought this county had pretty fair zoning and pollution control and all that. I mean Broward Beach is a-"

"Don't you know where you are, boy?" he asked. "You're a good mile west of that county line. You are in Shawana County Mister McGee. A garden spot. Go right over to Sunnydale, to the County Courthouse, and ever one of those happy, smiling five commissioners will tell you a man couldn't pick a better spot to live and raise his kids and grow with the county." He astonished me. I had never thought of Tush as being capable of irony. He was a big, amiable, beefy man, with mild blue eyes and stubbly pale lashes and brows, and a pink, peeling, permanent case of sunburn.

I heard a car drive in. He went to the window on the road side and looked out and said, "Oh… no." I followed him out. Janine had gotten out of the car, a very dusty pale blue sedan about two years old. At twenty paces she still had the gawky, leggy look and stance of a teenager. She stood in an attitude at once defiant and disconsolate, staring at the left rear corner of the car, which squatted expensively low. Their youngest, about two and a half, stood nearby, scowling, giving the intermittent snuffle of tears not long ended. Janine wore bleached khaki walking shorts and a yellow halter in a coarse fabric. The shorts were darkened with perspiration around her narrow waist. She had cropped her black hair very short. With her deep tan, and the length and strength and slender delicacy of her face, her dark eyes, she looked like a young man, Mediterranean, ready to guide you to the Roman ruins, pick your pocket, sell you fake heirlooms, send you out in a leaky gondola with his thieving cousin.

But the shape of the ears was girl, and the corners of the mouth, and the elegance of the throat, and from there on down no doubt at all, even were she clad in a loose-fitting mattress cover, no doubt whatsoever. And I knew her maiden name was Sorrensen, and she was Wisconsin Swede, and she birthed towheaded Swede kids, and so she was one of the improbabilities of genetic mathematics, of maybe one of the Scandinavian raiders who brought home from a far country a swarthy boy to be a kitchen slave.

Tush got down behind the car and rolled onto his back and wormed his way under it. She said, "It was just a half mile this side of the hard top. I guess the rains dug it out and then the dust drifted into it, and I swear, honey, nobody could have seen it."

He slid out. "Spring shackle."

"She hit me!" the little kid said. "She hit me awful hard, Pop."

"Were you going fast, Jan?" he asked her.

She stared at him. She raised a helpless arm and let it flap down. "Oh, good Christ, I was making better time than Phil Hill, laughing and singing because the world is so sweet, and I was probably all boozed up, and I was trying to break the goddamn whatever it is!"

She spun and went by me, giving me a sudden and startled glance of recognition, but too trapped then in the compulsions of the quarrel to deviate from the planned exit.

He shouted after her. "You can say hello to my friend! The least you can do is say hello to my friend!"

She walked ten more strides, shoulders rigid, and then turned at the motel doorstep and, with no expression on her face or in her voice, said, "Hello. Hello. Hello. Come on, Jimmy. Come with mother." The kid went plodding after her. The door closed.

Tush looked at me and shook his head and tried to smile. "Sorry, boy."

"For what? There are good days, medium days and bad days."

"We seem to be getting a long run of one kind."

"So, for starters let's fix it."

He ran it down to, the marina shed, where the tools were. We used the forklift to raise the back end. It took two gallons of sweat apiece to punch the busted pieces out, hacksaw some bar stock clumsy it into place and peen the ends over. We set it down and it sat level, no longer looking like a spavined duck. I stepped on the rear bumper and it didn't come back up as it should. It oscillated, good proof the shocks were nearly gone, and from the way he sighed I was sorry I'd done it.

I got fresh clothes off the boat, and Tush gave me a motel unit to shower and change in. I was just buttoning the clean shirt when Janine knocked at the door. I let her in. She carried a clinking pitcher of iced tea, and her apologetic pride. She wore a little pink cotton shift and a pale pink lipstick.

She put the pitcher down, put her hand out. "Hello the right way, Travis. Like welcome. Excuse the bad scene." Her hand was long and brown and slender, and her grip surprisingly strong. She poured the two tall glasses of tea and gave me one and took hers over and sat on the bed. I counted back and realized that this would be the fifth time I had seen her. And, as before, the chemistry was slightly off, as it so often is with the friend who knew the husband before the husband met the wife. It can be a kind of jealousy, I guess, because it is a reminder of years she didn't share, and of an acceptance of the husband's friendship, which was in no way her decision. She seemed to relate to me with a flavor of challenge. Prove yourself to me, McGee. But you can't, McGee, because you aren't housebroken. Your life isn't real. You drift around and you have your fun and games. You make my husband feel wistful about the debts he has and the girls he hasn't. When you come near my nest, just by being here, you remind my man of the gaudy grasshopper years, and somehow you turn me into some kind of guard, or attendant, or burden.

With some of the wives of old friends I have been able to quench that initial antagonism. They soon find out that I am aware of what every single unwed person knows-that the world is always a little out of focus when there is no one who gives the final total damn about whether you live or die. It is the price you pay for being a rambler, and if you don't read the price tag, you are a dull one indeed.

Jan had obvious warmth. She seemed to have the empathy to realize that I meant her well. But the antagonism wouldn't melt. She could hide it pretty well. But it was there.

I toasted her with tea, saying, "That was a mere snit, Janine. One of the tizzies you get during the hot months."

"Thanks," she said, and smiled. "Tush gobbled and ran. He took over the child taxi service. Come on over in about ten minutes and I'll have a sort of a lunch."

She finished the glass of tea, then poured herself another to take with her. As she moved toward the door she shook her head slowly and sadly. "You know, I think it was guilt mostly. Poor darn little Jimmy kid. What's wrong, Mom? What busted, Mom? Will it run, Mom? So I swatted him a dandy. Much too hard, without thinking. Taking it out on him." Beyond the wry smile her eyes looked wet. "I don't know what's happening to me lately. Oh, how I hate that goddamn car. That goddamn stinking car. How I hate it!"

Janine had nailed it. People hate their cars. Daddy doesn't come proudly home with the new one any more, and the family doesn't come racing out, yelling WOW, and the neighbors don't come over to admire it. They all look alike, for one thing. So you have to wedge a piece of bright trash atop the aerial to find your own. They may be named after predators, or primitive emotions, or astronomical objects, but in essence they are a big shiny sink down which the money swirls-in insurance, car payments, tags, tolls, tires, repairs.

They give you a chance to sit in helpless rage, beating on the steering wheel in a blare of horns while, a mile away, your flight leaves the airport. They give you a good chance of dying quick, and a better chance of months of agony of torn flesh, smashed guts and splintered bones. Take it to your kindly dealer, and the service people look right through you until you grab one by the arm, and then he says: Come back a week from Tuesday. Make an appointment. Their billions of tons of excreted pollutants wither the leaves on the trees and sicken the livestock. We hate our cars, Detroit. Those of us who can possibly get along without them do so very happily. For those who can't, if there were an alternate choice, they'd grab it in a minute. We buy them reluctantly and try to make them last, and they are not friendly machines anymore. They are expensive, murderous junk, and they manage to look glassily contemptuous of the people who own them. A car is something that makes you whomp your youngest kid too hard and then feel ashamed of yourself.

I had just been through the bit. My elderly Rolls pickup, Miss Agnes, was as agile as ever, which meant about 40 seconds from a dead stop to sixty miles an hour. And she had the same reluctance to come to a stop once she was humming along. So she and I were slowly becoming a highway hazard, the narrow shaves getting narrower. So I had gone shopping, test driving, and found they all had fantastic acceleration, and they'd all stop on dimes, and they all bored me to hell.

So I went looking for a boat I could use as a car. I would keep Miss Agnes for back roads and the Flush for open waters, and use the Munequita for errands, and if I had to have a car, there was Mr. Hertz trying hard, and Mr. Avis trying harder, and Mr. National hoping they'd run each other into the ground. Anything in Lauderdale that I wanted to buy, and I could lift, if I couldn't buy it right at Bahia Mar, I could go off in the Munequita and buy it. And it was nice to poot along an urban waterway and hear the distant clashing of fenders, gnashing of bumpers, and the song of the ambulances.

I realized I hadn't seen Tyler around, the Negro who had been working for them the other times I'd been there, a tall, stringy, cheerful, ageless man, dark saffron in color, and with a scholarly face, plus an uncanny knack of diagnosing the ailments of marine engines. I asked her if it was his day off.

"Oh, Tyler quit us… it must be eight months ago. Tush was very upset about it. You know how good he was around here. But now… it's just as well, I guess, because we couldn't afford to pay him anyway, the way things are."

"On account of the road?"

"And a lot of other things."

"Such as?"

"I think if Tush wants you to hear the tale of woe, he better be the one to tell you. But I'll tell you one thing, Travis McGee!" Her eyes narrowed, and she thumped her fist on the formica counter top. "We are not going to be run off this place!"

"Is somebody trying?"

"You'd best talk to Tush about it."

"Can you get a sitter for tonight?"

"Huh?"

"Wear your pretties and the three of us will go run-abouting into Broward Beach and track down some booze and some meat and come home late, singing all the way"

Her narrow face lighted up. "I would love it!"

And when Tush got back with the other two towheads, he approved. The sitter was handy. Jan explained they had made a special rate on a houseboat rental to a couple. Young kids. About twenty-one years old. They were in the houseboat where the old yellow station wagon was parked. There was a retired couple in the one on the far end. Those were the only two rented at the moment.

"Arlie and Roger Denn, their names are," Janine explained. "They're a little on the weird side. Sort of untidy-looking. He makes little funny figurine things and he makes shell jewelry She does handweaving and she paints these insipid little seascapes, and when they have enough, they fill up the station wagon and go around and sell them to gift shops. Sometimes it takes two days, and sometimes it takes a week."

Arlie Denn arrived for sitter duty right on time, and I could agree about the untidy part. She was a soft, doughy, pallid girl with a long tangle of dark blonde hair, wide, empty, indifferent blue eyes, a little sing-song voice and a mouth that hung open. She wore a man's white shirt, dirty. Pale blue denim walking shorts, ditto. Bare feet, also dirty. I could see why Janine had fed the kids before we left.

Once I had the little boat away, from the dock, I turned it over to Tush. And with the sun lowering behind us, we skimmed down the long, broad curves of the Shawana River, past the mangrove and the white herons, and out into the big bay where, corny as any postcard, a ketch was moving northward up the Waterway, sun turning the sails orapge, while a ragged flight of pelicans passed diagonally in front of her, heading for the rookery, pumping then soaring, taking the cue from the flight leader.

With his big paw on the twin throttles Tush raised a questioning eyebrow, and I made a shoving motion with the heel of my hand. Janine sat on a life cushion on the transom engine hatch, in her pretty yellow dress, her short black hair snapping in the wind, her face alight with the pleasure of speed and change and the rush of the soft evening air after the heat of the day.

At the city marina Tush slowed and we went up the channel and under the bridge, and along the bay side of the beaches. I took it into a place called Beach Marine, where the man said nobody would mess with it. We walked three blocks to a good place I knew. Thirty feet from the restaurant entrance Jan balanced herself with one hand on Tush's big shoulder while she changed from the zoris to the highheeled shoes she was carrying in her straw purse.

The drinks were good, the steaks were good, the evening was almost good. Every marriage at one time or another is going to run through some heavy weather. Heavy weather comes in all kinds of flavors. Slowly going broke, slowly losing the whole stake instead of making it like you thought you would-that can erode the happiest of hearts. With the two of them it wasn't a continuous thing. It just kept cropping up now and again, and clouding the fun and games.

There was just enough said for me to see the shape of the running quarrel, or argument, or regret. Over a year ago, when they had a chance to pull out, when they had a buyer for the place, Jan had wanted to take the loss and get out. Only about a ten-percent loss on what they'd put into it, but that didn't count all the hours of their brute labor. But he'd insisted it was just a run of bad luck. Nobody was really trying to stack the cards against them. Things would get better. Things always got better. Except when they get worse.

Tush didn't want to talk about it at all. To him it was like whining. He would let it go just so far, and then he would reach out, grab the conversational ball, and throw it the hell into center field.

But they seemed to have a good time, on average. Maybe a better time than in many months. It was overcast, and there was pink lightning on three sides of us when we went hurrying back across the bay. Tush picked up the markers for me with the handheld spotlight, with its 45,000 candles and its narrow one-mile beam. We got the boat tied up and the first fat drops were speckling the dust as we made it to the motel. The rain roar was coming. The fat sitter went cantering and bobbling off to her rented houseboat.

Maybe three inches came down in the hour we sat at the Bannon's breakfast bar and drank kitchen whisky and told lies.

Back in my borrowed motel unit, after starting to get ready for bed, I decided I'd better check the Munequita and see if the automatic bilge pump had handled the heavy rain and turned off, as promised. The air was washed clean, and the hungry mosquitoes hadn't begun to roam. The wind was rain-fresh, and from the west. The boat was fine, and, as I turned, the bulk of Tush Bannon standing in the night startled me.

"I miss the sound of that old hump-back bridge when the wind's from upriver," he said. "Not much traffic over it, but the timbers would rumble. You get so you don't even hear a sound like that, and then you miss it after it's gone."

"They put a new one there?"

He sighed. "Not there. Three miles further upriver. That hurts. It lost me most of the business I was getting from the people that live on the other side. TTA wanted it taken out. They wanted the road to it officially abandoned. We went to the Public Hearing and made a lot of noise, but what TTA wants from this county, TTA gets."

"Tush, if you need any help hanging on here until things pick up…"

"Forget it. Thanks, but forget it. It would just take that much longer to run down the drain."

"Is it all going to go?"

"Probably."

"Can you sell?"

"Sell what? Our equity? Go ask the bank what they think our equity is." He yawned. "Hell, I can always get a pretty good job selling. I can sell pretty good. Trouble is, I hate the work. 'Night, McGee. And thanks again. It was a good evening. It helped. We needed it bad."

I left the next morning. And that was in October, and I kept thinking about them and wondering about them, but I didn't do anything about it. I didn't run up there again. I wish I had. There are a lot of things in this life I wish I'd done, and a pretty gamey collection of things I wish I hadn't done-but the things you don't do leave the remorses,around a little longer somehow.

The last time I saw Tush Bannon alive was the weekend before Christmas, late on a Saturday afternoon. It was by the kind of accident so unlikely, one has the temptation to call it fate. My friend Mick Coseen was awaiting a very important phone call from Madrid, and he had given my phone number aboard the Busted Flush. So when it was delayed, he asked me if I'd take his car and run down to the Miami International and pick up his date, Barni Baker, a Pan-Am stewardess due in from Rio for a Miami layover. As I was the only other one in the group who knew her by sight, it was more efficient for me to go down.

For company I toted Puss Killian along in Mick's rental convertible. It was a cool, bright day, and the time of year when the gold coast is as empty as it ever gets. Nervous little men who own points in the big beach hotels brood about their fifth mortgages, and the retailers give fervent thanks that the Christmas pressure on the locals makes up for the lack of snowbird money. Puss is a big, stately, random redhead, a master of the put-on and the cop-out, who believes the world is mad, so she is the best of companions if you can keep up with the slants and shifts of her conversation, and merely irritating and confusing if you can't. A little herd was assembling, and it was shaping up party time.

We put the car in the lot and went in and checked the board, and the man said that 955 was just touching down. After the passengers had been herded off and aimed in the right direction, Barni, with her peer group, came brisk-clicking along, button-big, button-bright, a little candy-package blonde with eyes of widest innocent blue, eyes casting right and left, searching for Mick, finding me as I moved to intercept her. Big smile, gracious and wary acknowledgement of the introduction to Puss. I told her about Mick and his call, about an independent wanting somebody to take over the camera crew because their chief cameraman had racked himself up on a bicycle in Madrid traffic, and Barni Baker said to give her fifteen minutes, and I said we would be up at the bar on top of the International, and she said just fine and went tap-tapping away, moving firm and well in her uniform.

In the big blue windowed room high in the air, the cocktail business was still thin, because of the hour, and a familiar face was working the quiet and elegant bar, and he remembered The Drink, and seemed so pleased with himself in remembering, that we each had one, sitting and watching the deftness with silent and respectful attention. Two ample old-fashioned glasses, side by side, filled to the two thirds line with cracked ice. A big, unmeasured slosh of dry sherry into each glass. Then swiftly, the strainer placed across the top of one and then the other, as with a delicate snap of the wrist he dumped the sherry down the drain. Then fill to the ice level with Plymouth gin, rub the lemon peel around the inside of the rim, pinch some little floating beads of citrus oil on the surface of the drink throw away the peel, present with small tidy bow and flourish to the folk. "Two McGees," said he.

"Thank you, Harold," I said.

He had two new customers and when he moved away Puss hoisted her glass, tinked it against mine. "The instant drink," she said. "Instant stupidity, or instant rape, or instant permission. Me, what I get is this instant numbness around the chops. Here's to flying quail."

"To what?"

"To stewardessesl You're slow today, lover. You're not relating now and again."

"It's just that I was looking at you. Then I don't hear so well." And looking by chance beyond her, I saw Tush Bannon sitting at a deuce against the wall, the shoulder bulk hunched toward a still-faced girl who sat across from him. She had long, straight auburn-brown hair, a pout, impassive little face. She seemed to be listening to him with a thoughtful intentness, and she bit at the heavy bulge of her underlip and closed her eyes and slowly shook her head in a prolonged No.

That is not the point where one goes ambling over to the old buddy and whacks him on the shoulder and asks how Janine is. It was a private conversation, so private and intense they seemed to be inside an overturned bowl of thinnest glass, almost visible.

"Know them?" Puss asked.

"Just him."

"I'd say he's going to get called out on strikes. He's lost his cool. The hard sell makes a gal nervous these days."

"Hey!" said Barni Baker, and put her overnight case down and climbed up onto the stool on my right. She wore a little pale green sleeveless blouse with a high collar, a darker green short skirt, and she had little gold ladybugs in her pierced ears, and she wanted a bourbon sour.

Puss leaned forward and spoke across me, saying, "God, it must be the most marvelous, exciting, romantic thing in the world, jetting around to marvelously romantic places! It's really living, I bet. Those fascinating pilot types, and mysterious international travelers and all. I guess you realize how jealous of you all we earthbound females are, Barni."

There was just the slightest narrowing of Barni's eyes, gone in an instant. She leaned in from her side and said breathlessly, "Oh, yes! It's all my dreams come true, Miss Killian. To fly to all the lovely places in the world." She sighed and shook her pretty little head. "But it seems so… so artificial somehow to have to use an airplane, don't you think? But with my little broom, I can just barely get above the treelops. Have you had better luck?"

"I think having to carry that damned cat makes the difference," said Puss without hesitation. "And wear that stupid hat and the long skirts."

"And it's hard to enjoy the moonlight when you have to keep up that dreary cackling, don't you think?" Barni asked.

Tush came up behind me and said, "Talk to you a minute, Trav?" He turned and walked away before I could introduce him. The gals did not notice. I excused myself and followed Tush. Barni Baker moved over onto my stool. As I went out into the corridor, before the glass door swung shut, I heard the contralto bark of one of Puss's better laughs, in counterpoint with a silvery yet somehow earthy yelp from Barni. Knife-fighting among the females can spoil party time, and it was nice to know that this pair would get along.